Half life doesnt make my gfx card hot... is it being used?

[Sham B]

Hi folks.

When playing Doom 3 (or at least, playing it until I got bored of it, about half way through), I
noticed my 9800 pro getting very hot (I have an arctic cooler that vents out of the back, and you
can get a very good impression of how hard the GPU is working from this). It also does it in
Pacific fighters.

If I am playing half life 2 or Vampire Masquerade, the card never gets much hotter than idle, and I
can overclock it to mad levels without 'sparkling' pixel dots. This all points to the fact that
either the Source engine is highly optimized, or it just doesnt use many processor intensive
effects.

Wonder if anyone else has seen this? Seems to me that the limiting factor may be memory (Main and
onboard-gfx) and/or a well configured set of drivers, because my gfx card certainly doesnt feel as
if it is being tasked unless I go to mad resolutions. All that stuff about upgrading your card just
doesnt seem relevent for Source. If only they could fix that glitching though (Ive reduced it
with -heapsize but not eradicated it on either Source game)

S

 

[First of One]

The graphics in HL2, if you look closely, isn't really better than Far
Cry's. So go ahead and crank up resolution and turn on FSAA. Just as well,
because the game uses crisp textures and bright colors (unlike Doom3), the
"jaggies" can be pretty noticeable without FSAA.

 

[Neon]

If you want to make your card hot, just stop that little spinning thing on
the card. It won't take long for it to reach a temperature you will be
satisfied with.......